Frankenstein

By Sidney Perkowitz

The tale of a tormented creature created in a laboratory began on a rainy night in 1816 in the imagination of a nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Since its publication two years later, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus has spread around the globe through every possible medium and variation. Frankenstein has not been out of print once in 200 years. “Frankenstein” has become an indelible part of popular culture, and is shorthand for anything bizarre and human-made; for instance, genetically modified crops are “Frankenfood.”Conversely, Frankenstein’s monster has also become a benign Halloween favorite. Yet for all its long history, Frankenstein's central premise—that science, not magic or God, can create a living being, and thus these creators must answer for their actions as humans, not Gods—is most relevant today as scientists approach creating synthetic life.In its popular and cultural weight and its expression of the ethical issues raised by the advance of science, physicist Sidney Perkowitz and film expert Eddy von Muller have brought together scholars and scientists, artists and directions—including Mel Brooks—to celebrate and examine Mary Shelley’s marvelous creation and its legacy as the monster moves into his next century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781681776972

Book preview

PART ONE

THE ROOTS AND THEMES OF FRANKENSTEIN

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

—Victor Frankenstein, describing himself and his foster sister and fiancée Elizabeth.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The origins of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, the novel, are almost as arresting and dramatic as the origins of the creature so famously brought to life by its title character. Mary Shelley, just eighteen years old, the precocious daughter of decidedly offbeat parents—her mother was the fiercely independent feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died when Mary Shelley was still an infant—is whiling away a dark and stormy night in a lakeside villa cooking up scary stories with her husband, the poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their Bohemian pals. What occurred to the young woman during this casual exercise would become one of the most enduring works in the English language and would spawn two centuries of imitation, adaptation, and obsession.

Frankenstein, then, is a work both very much of its time, but also of our time. Our first group of essays returns to Shelley’s celebrated novel, viewed through several different critical lenses, and explores where this remarkable story came from and why it speaks so eloquently across the centuries and generations.

Literary critic and scholar Catherine Ross Nickerson takes a closer look at the author and her times—the late 18th and early 19th centuries—to reveal some of the forces that likely influenced Shelley’s sensibilities and storytelling: from the traditions of the Gothic novel and the Enlightenment thinkers she was exposed to at home to the traumas and complexities of her own unconventional domestic life and the iconoclastic ideas and ideals of her parents and her literary circle. Nickerson also cannily exposes the many ways in which the young author’s life is reflected in the lives of her ill-fated characters, whose constellations of family relationships are nothing if not complicated.

On the lighter side (or the lightning side), neurobiologist Dwayne Godwin and cartoonist Jorge Cham remind us that Frankenstein’s Monster, like Victory, had many fathers: Frankenstein was written at a time of intense interest in natural philosophy, when gentlemen amateurs, traveling showmen, and serious scientists alike were experimenting with, among other phenomena, electricity—creating the rich intellectual environment for the genesis of Shelley’s story.

Laura Otis, with a background in science and a deep understanding of its many intersections with the humanities and the arts, sees in Shelley’s novel expressions of emotional impulses and reactions relevant to any audience or era as Frankenstein, his creation, and their victims experience rejection, rage, yearning, and isolation. Otis’s essay underscores both the timeliness and timelessness of this remarkable text, demonstrating how both the young writer’s powerfully poetic use of language and contemporary psychological and sociological research resonate with the story’s enduring themes.

Finally, biblical scholar and theologian Steven J. Kraftchick articulates the nuanced and complex ways in which Mary Shelley compels us to confront monsters and monstrosity, good and evil. His exegesis reveals how this now perhaps deceptively familiar story presents its characters on a moral spectrum along which nobility and compassion can be far too easily corrupted by ambition, cowardice, and intolerance.

A thread weaving through all these essays is that of unintended consequences: the myriad ways in which actions, ideas, and influences—personal, poetic, psychological, historical—ripple out through stories and through lives to give rise later to things wondrous, tragic, and new, like the tale born on that blustery night so many years ago, which, as we shall see, continues to echo throughout our scientific and popular culture today.

1

HIDEOUS PROGENY:

TELLING A TALE OF MONSTERS IN FRANKENSTEIN

Catherine Ross Nickerson

Even if you have never read Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), you almost certainly know the story because of the book’s status as a touchstone in popular culture. Mary Shelley’s tale of ambitious folly and the unleashing of a resentful monster, has, as this volume attests, inspired many creative interpretations and adaptations. In this chapter, we will focus on the book itself: how it came to be, how its complex form highlights themes and issues in the story, and how it expresses the cultural anxieties of its day in the tale of a scientist who, in the process of creating a monster, makes himself into a kind of fiend.

This book about unhallowed beginnings has its own famous origin story. Mary Shelley wrote the original version of the tale as an entertainment for a circle of artists and writers, including Lord Byron and her husband, Percy Shelley, on vacation in Italy in the summer of 1816. They were staying together in a large house, and it rained a great deal. To entertain themselves, they started reading ghost stories aloud in the evenings, and when they ran out of published stories, they proposed writing their own. Shelley’s first version of the story was created there, as a tale to be read aloud in a single evening. She continued to work on it, expanding it into a novel over the next two years, and publishing it in 1818. Shelley revised it significantly for a new edition in 1831, adding an introduction that sheds light on her own understanding of the novel. The introduction also discusses her intellectual history and background. She was the daughter of two intellectual radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, both of whom were involved in revolutionary movements in the late 18th century. The way that they had grappled with the troubling characteristics of British social order in the period—the sexism, the racism, the disenfranchisement of the middle and lower class—clearly influenced Shelley and shaped the narrative of Frankenstein.

What most readers first notice is that the book takes a long time to get going. Indeed, the story as a whole moves rather slowly, with a good deal of time spent on the backgrounds of characters, descriptions of landscapes, and long philosophical passages. The slow pace of the story may seem counter to the needs of a classic horror story, but Shelley was working within an established literary tradition for writing about fear: the Gothic novel. Shelley’s precursors in the Gothic tradition include dozens of popular novels, including Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). A typical novel of this type features a young woman who has been orphaned or separated from at least one parent. She comes to reside in a strange house, a big and complicated structure. She undertakes, bit by bit, a quest to understand the mysterious people, sounds, and activities around her, but her investigations are thwarted in multiple ways. Metaphorically, the heroine is exploring the way the larger, patriarchal society works. Within the story, we continually encounter locked doors and windows, missing keys, candles that won’t stay lit, people who cannot speak. This repeated highlighting of obstacles to knowledge and resolution is reinforced by the narrative structure of these kinds of stories, which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick likens to a Chinese box (a puzzle of boxes within boxes with hidden springs and sliding panels that allow them to be extricated from each other). While the plot is quite different from other novels of this type, Frankenstein’s multiple stories-within-stories form a narrative structure inherited from the Gothic.

Frankenstein, the novel, is also distinguished by its multiple first-person narrators. Walton, the icebound captain of an exploration vessel, rescues Victor Frankenstein. The reader learns about Victor through letters Walton writes to his sister, and Shelley uses Walton’s telling of Victor’s story as a classic sort of framed tale. In addition, within Victor Frankenstein’s narrative, other characters speak: Elizabeth and Alphonse (Victor’s adopted sister and his father) speak through letters to Victor; the monster speaks through the story he tells Victor about his escape and education. Furthermore, several stories that intersect with the main narrative are told in great detail: the life of adoptee and Frankenstein household servant Justine, before, during, and after her trial for a murder the monster actually committed; Safie’s family history before coming to live with the De Lacey family in the cottage where the monster is hiding. In Gothic novels, the layers of narration serve as testimony to the power and frightfulness of the tale being told, as if it is a hot pan that needs to be muffled in layers of cloth so no one gets burned. Documents like the letters we see here offer a verification of the authenticity—a fake authenticity—of the story, indicating that the story has been heard and accepted by more than one person. In Frankenstein, there are stories within stories as well as stories, like Walton’s, that frame the story. As a result, a reader can open the book in the middle and not be sure who I is. Is it Victor speaking, or is it the monster? That is clearly an intended effect, to enact in the narrative structure one of the main Gothic themes of the novel: that Victor and his monster are doubles for each other.

When we think about the differences between the novel and the films based on it, all the carefully constructed layers of narrative in the novel make a sharp contrast to the iconic, exciting It’s alive! moment of so many of the films. In the novel, we have, instead of a literal or metaphorical lightning strike of triumphant genius, a report of the creature opening its eyes, taking a breath, and twitching, tucked into the end of a sentence, followed by Victor’s direct address to the reader about the difficulty of telling this story at all: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch … ? (chapter 5 [chapter numbers refer to the 1831 edition]).

The novel represents the moment of animation not as a moment of thrilling triumph but as a moment of underwhelmed disappointment shading toward despair. Victor admits that he wanted his creation to be beautiful, but instead, after two years of work, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart (chapter 5). What is so horrifying about the creature is that it shows Victor to be a failure. Victor realizes that he does not instill life and vigor but rather deals in death and decay, which the nightmare he has immediately after reinforces. In it, he kisses his beloved Elizabeth and she morphs from a young woman in the bloom of health (chapter 5) into the corpse of his late mother, ridden with worms. He wanted to create a superior form of human; he realizes that what he has created is freakishly inhuman, a miserable monster, more hideous than a reanimated mummy, demoniacal, something even Dante, master portraitist of Hell, could not have imagined (chapter 5).

Undertaking this transgressive project has transformed Victor as well. He has isolated himself from his fellow students in a workshop of filthy creation, and his obsessive ambition has led him to seek body parts from the dissecting room and the slaughter-house; he is filled with loathing for my occupation, and yet he pushes on compulsively (chapter 5). He is made physically and mentally ill, he becomes secretive and cuts off communication with his family, he strays far from his own ideal of a life that does not allow any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of [one’s] domestic affections (chapter 5). Even as he knows that his kind of overweening, brutal ambition leads to calamity, war, the destruction of empire, and the enslavement of people (chapter 5), he cannot stop himself from piecing together his experiment in defiance of the proper limits of human power. By his own standards, he has become a monster, too.

The creature, then, is born out of an unholy conjunction of male ambition and a belief that new scientific methods could hold the keys to the locked mysteries of the universe. In this portrait of Victor as a scientist seeking, without ethical constraints, to isolate and control the life force, the novel expresses the urgent anxiety growing in British culture immediately after the Enlightenment. Victor’s education recapitulates the changing scientific paradigms and practices throughout the 18th century. When Victor’s father refers to the work of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus as sad trash (chapter 2), he is expressing a widely held belief among educated people that the age of alchemy was over and had to yield to modern disciplines like chemistry. Alchemy, which Agrippa referred to as natural magic, appealed to the young Victor and his fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature (chapter 2). However, when he witnesses a massive oak tree near his home reduced to splinters by a lightning strike, he comes to feel that the mysteries of the natural world would always elude his understanding, and he turns to the study of mathematics instead.

At the university in Ingolstadt, Victor is taught that alchemy has been thoroughly discredited, and he takes up the study of chemistry with Waldman instead. But even as Victor learns something we can recognize today as a rational scientific method based on experimentation and observation, he is also under the spell of the charismatic Waldman, who proclaims that modern scientists have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. These words, which portray scientists as gods, are what set Victor on his disastrous course. He calls them words of fate, enounced to destroy me (chapter 3). In the moment, though, they awaken Victor; soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose … I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation (chapter 3). Victor, the maker of monsters, is himself brought to life at this moment. We might even say that he is galvanized, as a nod to the term Shelley uses in her introduction to the tale. He synthesizes the alchemists’ pursuit of boundless grandeur (chapter 3) and the restless and relentless experimentation of the chemists and biologists. He is, in his own way, a frightening figure in the post-Enlightenment landscape, a pieced-together chimera of irrational motivations and rational methods.

How did poor Victor turn out so badly? He seems to lack the internal ethical gyroscope that would have steered him away from such a hideous, dangerous, and blasphemous project. The novel hints at a domestic source of the trouble. In the early 19th century, questions about the proper nurture of children and the best arrangements for family life were increasingly in the air. Victor attests that no human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself (chapter 2). And yet there are multiple anomalies in the Frankenstein household. The novel opens with an account of how Alphonse and Caroline, Victor’s parents, came to be married: Caroline, left orphaned and destitute by her irresponsible father, was rescued by Alphonse, raised by a Frankenstein relation, and wed to him two years later. Theirs was not an entirely normative marriage: There is a significant difference in age, there is the way that Caroline went from being something like an adopted daughter to a wife, there is a complex web of emotional debts they owe and pay to each other, there is a kind of post-traumatic fragility in Caroline that draws Alphonse to hover near.

This pattern is then duplicated with Victor’s intended. Elizabeth Lavenza, another orphaned daughter of an upper-class man, is adopted into the family because she is so pretty and charming. Victor tells us twice that she is my more than sister, and we see another case of the blurred roles of women in the house, with patterns of intimacy different from what one might expect. The novel asks us to see Caroline and Elizabeth as twinned, or even interchangeable, in the way that Elizabeth comes down with scarlet fever and infects only Caroline, who dies; Elizabeth then takes on the role of mother to her younger brother, William (chapter 2). She also takes on the role of lover and bride to her older brother, Victor. There is also the complicated relationship that Justine has with the Frankenstein family; she has the dual role of servant and a sort of cousin. Her relationship with her rejecting, resentful biological mother is a grim mirror of the system of obligations that tie together the Frankensteins. Like Caroline and Elizabeth before her, Justine’s proper role is to be the most grateful little creature in the world (chapter 6). All three women seem to be without larger ambitions, content to shape their lives to the needs of the Frankenstein household.

With these grateful women—all brought into the family by way of rescue—and an indulgent father, Victor does have an idyllic boyhood and is spared the difficulty of finding a mate, as Elizabeth is right there already, bound to him by the deathbed promise extracted by their dying mother. This irregular, structurally incestuous household, bound together by the silken cord (chapter 1) of a benevolent patriarch, seems to fail Victor in some significant ways. He complains that he feels cooped up and is eager to leave for university. But more fatally, all the attention and generalized gratitude focused on him by female kin allow his ego to grow to enormous proportions. His masculine grandiosity is apparent in his studies before the age of seventeen: he is attracted to the sweeping promises of the alchemists, hoping for the glory that would come with finding the elixir of life, and attempting incantations to raise ghosts or devils (chapter 2). These fixations of course foreshadow what he will accomplish in building his monster at Ingolstadt, but they also suggest that his excessive ambitions were cultivated in the hothouse of the Frankenstein home.

Victor himself is wholly inadequate as a father. The monster is of course Victor’s double, but he is also Victor’s hideous progeny, to borrow a term Shelley applied to the novel itself. He rejects his newly alive creation—twice that first night and on their second encounter, it reaches out to him with a grin on its face. He abandons the creature in a passive attempted infanticide and is relieved when it seems to have fled the premises by the next day. Victor is horrified by what he has wrought, but he doesn’t think at all about what it might be like to be the monster. And as we learn later, the monster does indeed have subjectivity and an inner life. He has the intelligence to differentiate amongst his five senses, to understand pain, fear, misery, and delight, and, eventually, to acquire spoken and written language. In her narration of the education of the monster, Shelley is playing with the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and other Enlightenment thinkers who were important to the Romantics. The monster is born into a state of innocence: it has an instinct for self-preservation, but also an instinct for compassion. We see that it knows to hide itself from angry, frightened villagers, but also that it is able to empathize with the De Lacey family, to see their sadness and suffering, and even to discern their gentle manners. The monster longs for community, and it attempts to use its superhuman strength to help children in particular, but it is attacked violently every time it makes itself visible. The bitterness and cruelty and destructiveness we see later is all learned; the monster is fundamentally a moral creature, who says that while hearing narratives of human history, I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow (chapter 13).

The monster’s more formal education teaches it what it has been deprived of, which is to say the kind of idealized childhood that Victor enjoyed: it reads about how the father doted on the smiles of the infant … how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapped in the precious charge … and all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bond (chapter 13). Its ability to read strengthens its sense of deprivation: when it reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost, it notes that Adam, unlike itself, is able to converse with his doting creator, and realizes that the envious, hell-banished Satan is its true entry point into the poem. By the time it discovers Victor’s journal in his coat, it has a moral perspective on what Victor has done, on the disgusting circumstances of the creation of my odious and loathsome person. It cries, "Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?" (chapter 15).

With those words, the monster sums up Victor’s profound failure. Victor’s ability to bring a pieced-together creature to life does not endow him with the glory he sought as a child. He becomes instead a frightened, heartbroken man whose greatest accomplishment must be kept a secret. Even before we hear the monster’s account of his first two years, there is little to admire in Victor. And yet, we feel Victor’s agony and his fear as the monster launches the campaign of revenge that ultimately consumes everyone Victor loves.

One of the reasons that the narration works the way it does is the tension between the different kinds of fear that Shelley invokes. In an 1826 essay, On the Supernatural in Poetry, Gothic novelist Anne Radcliffe made a famous distinction: Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. Horror is what we and Victor and all the various villagers feel when we see the gruesomely animated corpse. Terror builds as Victor senses, instinctively, that his monster has killed his younger brother, William, has successfully framed Justine for the murder, and is out to get revenge in ways that Victor can only imagine, leaving him in dread and misery (chapter 20). Terror is about anticipation of something only partly known and is the element that advances the narrative momentum in this book of stories within stories. What will the monster do? we and Victor wonder. It is like us, it is partly human—but it is also partly other things.

When Victor and the monster meet after those two years, the monster comes off as the more rational of the two and exhibits a level of self-knowledge his creator has yet to attain. It explains, I am malicious because I am miserable (chapter 17) and make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous (chapter 10). Its proposed solution—that Victor create a mate for it—comes from its education in issues of what Enlightenment thinkers would have called natural rights: Shall each man … find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? (chapter 20). For Shelley, and for her first audience in the early 19th century, the fantastical tale of a scientist who brings a corpse to life quickly connects to questions about the definition of personhood, natural rights, and the burning questions of the ethics, politics, and economic systems of empire and slavery.

Our monster subscribes to the Enlightenment formulation, repeated in the American Declaration of Independence, of the self-evident rights to "life,